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get around this.
    I’m writing this log to you, dear future Mars archaeologist, from Rover 2. You may wonder why I’m not in the Hab right now. Because I fled in terror, that’s why! And I’m not sure what the hell to do next.
    I guess I should explain what happened. If this is my last entry, you’ll at least know why.
    Over the past few days, I’ve been happily making water. It’s been going swimmingly. (See what I did there? “Swimmingly”?)
    I even beefed up the MAV fuel plant compressor. It was very technical (I increased the voltage to the pump). So I’m making water even faster now.
    After my initial burst of 50 liters, I decided to settle down and just make it at the rate I get O 2 . I’m not willing to go below a 25-liter reserve. So when I dip too low, I stop dicking with hydrazine until I get the O 2 back up to well above 25 liters.
    Important note: When I say I made 50 liters of water, that’s an assumption. I didn’t
reclaim
50 liters of water. The additional soil I’d filled the Hab with was extremely dry and greedily sucked up a lot of the humidity. That’s where I want the water to go anyway, so I’m not worried, and I wasn’t surprised when the reclaimer didn’t get anywhere near 50 liters.
    I get 10 liters of CO 2 every fifteen hours now that I souped up the pump. I’ve done this process four times. My math tells me that, including my initial 50-liter burst, I should have added 130 liters of water to the system.
    Well my math was a damn liar!
    I’d gained 70 liters in the water reclaimer and the space-suit-turned-water-tank. There’s plenty of condensation on the walls and domed roof, and the soil is certainly absorbing its fair share. But that doesn’t account for 60 liters of missing water. Something was wrong.
    That’s when I noticed the other O 2 tank.
    The Hab has two reserve O 2 tanks. One on each side of the structure, for safety reasons. The Hab can decide which one to use whenever it wants. Turns out it’s been topping off the atmosphere from Tank 1. But when I add O 2 to the system (via the oxygenator), the Hab evenly distributes the gain between the two tanks. Tank 2 has been slowly gaining oxygen.
    That’s not a problem. The Hab is just doing its job. But it does mean I’ve been gaining O 2 over time. Which means I’m not consuming it as fast as I thought.
    At first, I thought “Yay! More oxygen! Now I can make water faster!” But then a more disturbing thought occurred to me.
    Follow my logic: I’m gaining O 2 . But the amount I’m bringing in from outside is constant. So the only way to “gain” it is to be using less than I thought. But I’ve been doing the hydrazine reaction with the assumption that I was using all of it.
    The only possible explanation is that I haven’t been burning all the released hydrogen.
    It’s obvious now, in retrospect. But it never occurred to me that some of the hydrogen just wouldn’t burn. It got past the flame, and went on its merry way. Damn it, Jim, I’m a botanist, not a chemist!
    Chemistry is messy, so there’s unburned hydrogen in the air. All around me. Mixed in with the oxygen. Just…hanging out. Waiting for a spark so it can
blow the Hab up!
    Once I figured this out and composed myself, I got a Ziploc-sized sample bag and waved it around a bit, then sealed it.
    Then, a quick EVA to a rover, where we keep the atmospheric analyzers. Nitrogen: 22 percent. Oxygen: 9 percent. Hydrogen: 64 percent.
    I’ve been hiding here in the rover ever since.
    It’s Hydrogenville in the Hab.
    I’m very lucky it hasn’t blown. Even a small static discharge would have led to my own private
Hindenburg
.
    So, I’m here in Rover 2. I can stay for a day or two, tops, before the CO 2 filters from the rover and my space suit fill up. I have that long to figure out how to deal with this.
    The Hab is now a bomb.

CHAPTER 5
    LOG ENTRY: SOL 38
    I’m still cowering in the rover, but I’ve had time to think. And I know how to deal with the